


This Is How It Goes

by cardinalrachelieu



Category: A Court of Thorns and Roses Series - Sarah J. Maas
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Feyre is not, I'M SORRY D:, Immortality, Rhys is immortal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-02
Updated: 2017-01-02
Packaged: 2018-09-14 04:13:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9160816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cardinalrachelieu/pseuds/cardinalrachelieu
Summary: This is how it goes: her wrinkled, age-spotted hands pressed between his smooth, undamaged ones, free of scars left by time and fickle, fragile mortality.This is how it goes: his breaths coming heavy and hard despite being here before, so many times and with so many people. Different faces but always the same end, always stolen away just as he was beginning to forget his life before them, his life without them; just as he would think—hope—it would last, that they would be different, that this time would be different.





	

This is how it goes: her wrinkled, age-spotted hands pressed between his smooth, undamaged ones, free of scars left by time and fickle, fragile mortality.

This is how it goes: his breaths coming heavy and hard despite being here before, so many times and with so many people. Different faces but always the same end, always stolen away just as he was beginning to forget his life before them, his life without them; just as he would think— _hope_ —it would last, that they would be different, that this time would be different.

This is how it goes: a rogue tear carving a valley down his cheek, hot and lonesome in its journey as he takes in the view of her final moments, a life she’d chosen to share with him, a never-ending existence made bearable by her presence, by her love.

This is how it goes: a piece of him ripped out with the final beats of her heart, a fragment of a soul so chipped and crumbling that it’s a wonder—a curse—he continues to wake each morning with how hollow he’s become.

He wants to follow after her, chase her into that void he’s longed to experience firsthand for centuries. In some ways, he’s glad his attempts never worked, glad he continued to live just so he’d been able to occupy the same world she had, the world now made darker by her absence.

A broken sound, borne of loss and desolation, of depthless anger and vicious sorrow, builds and builds until it explodes from his throat and the nearby birds flee, the flap of their wings reminding him too much of her steadfast belief in angels, of how she’d always reassured him that she would continue to be with him even after her body expired.

_“You can’t get rid of me that easily, Rhys.”_

He laughs and it feels like talons scratching him from the inside, the memory morphing between a thing of comfort and a thing of torture.

Everyone dies, he knows—has learned. Everyone… but him.

At one point in time, he’d understood this, had quarantined himself from the rest of humanity so he’d never have to endure the trauma of another loss, another death, another soul snatched from this plane of existence—his prison—before he was ready to say goodbye. (He was never ready to say goodbye.)

But then she’d come along, radiant and sharp and _tempting._ She was passion and rage and flames and ice, and, for the first time in almost fifty years, he’d been interested in keeping someone’s company, in discovering her favorite season and the way she liked her coffee and why _she’d_ been the one to pull him from his self-imposed exile. But he knew how it would end, knew how it would always end.

He’d shut her out at first, acting cruel and cold and damaged—a mask he’d formed from the jagged edges of the wounds left by those no longer with him, a mask near indistinguishable from his true self—but she’d been relentless, and, if he was being honest, he hadn’t been able to stay away.

She was a singularity and, though time had failed to sink its teeth into him, gravity worked just as well as it did on anyone else. He’d been hopelessly caught in her orbit with no desire to break free, not that he could have even if he’d tried.

 _“I normally don’t… talk to people,”_ he’d told her, unsure but willing to take the chance on her, on what they might be.

 _“Sounds like a dull existence.”_ Her scoff had set his blood thrumming, had been a siren song upon a sea of isolation.

_“You have no idea.”_

This is how it goes: bits of her, bits of their interactions, haunting his consciousness, looming over him like a storm cloud.

 _“Forever, huh?”_ She’d nibbled on fresh berries, berries he’d picked for her that morning, as she processed the news that his time on the earth had no upper limit.

_“Unfortunately.”_

This is how it goes: the film of their life together playing on repeat, projected on every space of his mind, even the spaces he’d long forgotten about, the spaces he’d neglected for so many years cobwebs had begun to form.

 _“You can’t leave. Please, you can’t leave. Not yet.”_ A close-call eight years ago, a fall that had shattered her hip and forced the doctors to place her in a medically induced coma. He’d lived in that hospital for a week, making the too-hard couch his bed, refusing to budge until she opened her eyes again.

Home was wherever she was, he finally admitted to himself, bent uncomfortably on the cushions of that too-small piece of hospital furniture, watching the machines pump oxygen into her frail, failing lungs. He’d never expected to open himself up again, had never expected to be given this long with her, had never expected to be kept awake by the thought that she might pass away while he was dreaming, had never expected to fall in love.

And yet.

This is how it goes: his cursed, beating heart turning to stone as the last of the tears dry on his face.

 _“Promise me that you won’t shut the world out once I’m gone.”_ Her first words to him after the breathing tube had been pulled free and they’d been left alone.

 _“Don’t talk like that_ — _”_

_“Promise me, Rhys.”_

This is how it goes: the echo of her spirit clanging wildly, painfully, in his chest, reminding him that she had been real, that it had all been real.

 _“You are the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”_ There was a whole ocean behind his eyes threatening to pour out, and he was more than happy to drown if it meant following her into the abyss. But he couldn’t, no matter how desperately he wanted to, so he fortified the dam and held her more tightly. It wouldn’t be long now.

_“I’m so happy I met you, Rhysand.”_

He’d loved them all, but she’d been different. She’d been new. In all the millennia he’d suffered through, he’d never met anyone like her, and he was certain he never would again.

 _Soulmate_ was the word, he’d decided late one evening back when she was only in her thirties, back when they’d danced until dawn and loved so brightly that even the stars grew jealous.

 _“What’s it like to be immortal?”_ she’d asked him one night, pressed flush to his chest, sheets tangled around them, skin slick with sweat and breaths still coming in huffs.

_“Lonely.”_

This is how it goes, he remembers, the familiar embrace of grief taking root in his core, crystallizing along his ribs and the spaces in-between, eclipsing that budding bloom of hope he’d mistakenly planted on the off-chance that she would be with him forever.

This is how it goes.

This is how it goes.

**Author's Note:**

> I'M SO SORRY I DON'T KNOW HOW THIS HAPPENED ONE MINUTE AN IMMORTAL!AU PLOT BUNNY WAS HOPPING ACROSS MY MIND AND THE NEXT THING I KNEW THIS WORK OF PAIN WAS STARING BACK AT ME
> 
> join me on [tumblr](http://yalenayardeen.tumblr.com) for more tears and angst.
> 
> thank you for reading!


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